


Closure Is A Silly Word

by Herself_nyc



Series: Not Dead [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-01
Updated: 2015-12-01
Packaged: 2018-05-04 06:36:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5324162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Herself_nyc/pseuds/Herself_nyc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years later, Dawn struggles with what it means to have a sister the world thinks is missing presumed dead, but whom she knows has been turned, and traveling with Spike.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Closure Is A Silly Word

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to my fic ["Not Dead".](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1993800)
> 
> Mucho thanks to Rebcake, who did great beta work on this.
> 
> This story was created for the fall 2015 season of Seasonal_Spuffy on Livejournal.

  
Art by red_satin_doll.

Autumn in New York was very different from autumn in Southern California. Like autumn in Chicago, where she’d lived for the first three years after Buffy’s …  After. Here they had textbook autumn. Here, the air got crisp, the leaves of the deciduous trees turned a hundred exhilirating shades of yellow, brown, red, orange, and when the sunlight hit them, as it was doing now in Washington Square on a bright day in October, it was magical. Dawn squinted up into the overhead mass of illuminated color, from the bench that had the vantage she liked best: good trees, and the Washington arch on the right, and beyond the trees, the row of sedate old brick rowhouses that were right out of Edith Wharton and Henry James. 

_Magical, heh,_ Dawn thought. She could use the word _magic_ now like everybody else used it. It was a metaphor, or a simile, or a sleight-of-hand trick, or it was something Harry Potter did. That was all. She’d left the world where magic was real, left it completely, and she wasn’t ever going to go back there.

She didn’t have to go back, to get this done. _This_ was the paperwork she’d just taken out of her laptop bag, which had come from the lawyer in Sunnydale. Aunt Arlene had helped her find the lawyer, who’d made all the arrangements. She could just sign the papers and send them back via FedEx.

The papers that would declare that, after being missing for five years, her sister, Buffy Anne Summers, was dead.

Buffy had disappeared in early November, and each year since, Dawn had dreaded the return of the day. Dreaded it because it was horrible. And because she’d had to lie about it, lie to almost everyone, and could never tell how much _more_ horrible to her the truth was. And because in fact her sister had not really disappeared, wasn’t really missing—not except right at first—but she was absolutely gone. More gone, somehow, than when she’d just died. When she was just deceased. Before Willow and the others went and brought her back, brought back that Buffy who was sad and unapproachable and full of dread and trouble, and who, in such a short time, had abandoned her again. Abandoned her in the worst way. Ripping from her everything that was Dawn’s—home on Revello, school and all her friends, the Scoobies, her town—and Spike. Spike who had looked after her and let her cry and cried with her.

And yeah, here she was almost five years later doing very well thank you, on the honor roll at NYU, soaking up all the wonderful fun of New York, and she had lots of people from high school and now here who loved her, and she had a home to go back to with Aunt Arlene in Evanston, and life was fantastic.

Except that her dead sister wouldn’t leave her alone.

 

Dawn shuffled through the sheaf of legal papers, looking for the little red stickies where she had to sign her name. It would be great, she thought, if these papers could do more than get the state of California to acknowledge that Buffy was dead. If by signing them she could get Buffy herself to realize that she was dead to her—that was what Dawn wished for. Then she’d just stop with the emails, and the text messages, and the attempts to trick her into answering her mobile—Dawn never answered calls from numbers she didn’t recognize. In the first year, she’d heard from Buffy all the time, like every day, _How are you, are you OK, won’t you please just talk to me, just write me back._ At first Dawn had responded—sometimes. She’d email back, _I’m OK, don’t worry about me. Aunt Arlene’s OK. It’s fine._ But after a while she didn’t even do that. What was the point? Every message from Buffy was just another piercing evocation of the fact that she’d left her behind. Anyway, there was no going back, not to any of it, not to when Buffy was alive, not to Sunnydale, not to Mom. It was all gone. All these attempts just felt to Dawn like another reminder that half her memories were a construct. She herself wasn’t even real.

Since that first year, Buffy had backed off some. She’d email once a month or so. Dawn mostly didn’t read what she wrote. 

She signed the last line on the last form, and slotted the papers back into the FedEx envelope. 

_I know this is so hard for you, Dawnie_ , Aunt Arlene had emailed her that morning. _Harder for you than for anyone. But maybe now you’ll be able to feel some closure. Closure is a silly word—nothing ever closes like that. But you can turn a corner. Everything’s in front of you._

Closure _was_ a silly word, Dawn thought. She was more intent on getting the house on the market, and whether the renters would just buy it, and for how much.  That was the kind of closing she could get interested in, the kind that would put money in her pocket.  She might not be real, but NYU tuition was.

~~~

“Maybe if she _sees_ me,” Buffy said.  She was pacing the room, and Spike, in bed, was watching her pace, and wishing she’d stop. “It’s been such a long time, she’s got to be way more grown up. Anyway I need to see her. No matter what happens. I’ve waited long enough.”

“You want to go to New York, love?” Spike said. “We’ll go to New York.”

“Don’t you want to see her?”

“Course I do.”

“We should’ve done this already. Why haven’t we done this already? Years ago.”

“Because you thought it might’ve made it worse.”

“And _you_ thought she’d tell on us.”

“Didn’t like to think so, but she was angry. She didn’t seem any less angry. Anger’s dangerous.”

“ _You_ thought she’d miss us, you said it would just take a little while before she’d come around. A little while!”

“Yeah, well … I was wrong.”

What she knew about Dawn, which wasn’t much, came from Angel. Angel didn’t hear from her very often, but she sent him perfunctory notes from time to time, so he’d been able to tell Buffy when Dawn had graduated from high school, and when she’d gone backpacking in Europe after that as a present from Aunt Arlene, and where she was now going to college. But Buffy was barely speaking to Angel, who had plenty of problems of his own. They’d never gone back to LA in the five years since. They’d been a lot of other places. Though Buffy kept talking about it, so far they hadn’t made a home. Every time it seemed like they’d found a city she might like to stay in, and begun to talk about finding a place to settle into, Buffy had found some excuse for moving on.

There was something about it, for all she talked of wanting a home, a home with him, that, Spike thought, put her off. Made her feel vulnerable, made her feel … feelings.

Right now they were in Berlin.  They’d left North America shortly after the last time they’d seen Dawn. It seemed less risky, Spike figured, outside of the US, less chance that Willow and the Scoobies might twig to their existence in some deliberate or accidental way. They’d been round the world twice since Buffy was turned. They’d realized pretty soon that they didn’t know each other very well, and didn’t know how little they knew; it had been hard. They’d had some odd times, some uncomfortable times, some frightening times.

They’d done some slaying, but nothing very big or world-saving, because it would be suicide to get onto the radar of the Watcher’s Council. Often they quarreled—or, as Spike thought of it, _she’d_ quarreled, because he never started it and was always glad to end it. She’d even walked out on him more than once, sometimes taking herself off for weeks at a time, not answering his calls, making him wait where he was for her to decide to find him again. Sometimes they’d worked straight jobs for something to do, for routine—he’d tended bar, she’d taught kickboxing and yoga at night at 24-hour gyms, in Hong Kong, in Tokyo, in Dubai, in Copenhagen. When they got bored or needed to move on, they quit. Spike had money, and could always get more; Buffy never asked about it.

The boredom was hard for her. She wasn’t used to it. Wasn’t used to being disconnected from all her people, existing outside of time. Not having a destiny.  She didn’t talk much about that, per se. Still, Spike could guess, when she’d be abstracted and irritable, that she was missing those who had been her friends, whom she now had to fear. Missing the old life. Missing, sometimes, though he hated to think it, being dead and in Heaven.

Spike too had forgotten, in those couple of years since the chip and falling for Buffy, how to fill up, not just the time, but the space in his mind, when it wasn’t being given to hatching evil plots and playing wicked games with Dru, or, afterwards, to keeping tabs on his world-saving Chosen One crush. 

Everywhere they went, they killed vampires, but he could tell Buffy wondered whether that was enough. Really whether it was, anymore, anything.

“So, we’ll go to New York.” He got up from the bed and went to her, put an arm around her shoulders. When he touched her sometimes, she’d jerk away; she’d been especially hinky and evasive and withholding the last weeks. But now she turned towards him, and laid her forehead against his neck. “Oh Spike. I lead you such a life. Why do you let me treat you this way?”

“What could I do to stop you?”

“You could leave me. You could just … “ she sighed. “Leave.”

“Wouldn’t do that, would I?”

He felt her trembling, and realized she’d begun to cry. She cried so seldom, since the beginning of all this, he couldn’t think when she’d last done so, since their time in Mexico. He held himself still, resisting his desire to take her into a full embrace, lest she pull away altogether. The moment suddenly seemed so fragile.

“No, you’re not the one who leaves. That’s me. I leave. I leave, and leave and—and then there’s no going back.”

“Sssh. We’ll find her.”

“She hates me. Hates us. It would be selfish of me, wouldn’t it, to just show up—? She won’t answer when I write— But I’ve left her too many times. And now I’ve left it too late.” Her voice was shaky with swallowed sobs. She stepped away from him, and turned her back. “Spike, I don’t know how … “

“What?”

She still kept her back to him, and her shoulders were hunched, she might’ve been ready to draw herself down into a little ball. She whispered into her hands pressed against her face. “I don’t know how much more of this I can do.”

“This—?”

“You are so good to me. And I—you know I try to—but us all alone, it’s … it’s …”

He finished it for her. “It’s not enough. Without your sister.”

She broke out weeping then, and sank to her knees.

~~~

He found Dawn easily enough. The first evening after they arrived, after checking in to the Chelsea Hotel—his ninth stay there since 1900, Buffy’s first—he’d gone alone to Greenwich Village, and after asking in vain at the security desk of the first two NYU dorms he tried, was told at the third that he’d be announced, if he’d give his name and show ID. At which point, pretending he’d forgotten something, he went outside again to lurk across the street and wait to spot her. She came out, wearing a down jacket and carrying a laptop bag, close to nine o’clock. He knew her by her walk; she’d cut off the long hair, grown another couple of inches, and shed all her old resemblance to a baby deer. He tailed her easily as she walked through Astor Place and then went into a restaurant called Dojo, which was packed with a crowd of mostly students, mostly in noisy groups. But she wended her way amongst the tables to a small one against the wall where she sat and took out her computer. Spike watched, waiting to see if she’d be joined by anyone.

When she’d sat there alone for twenty minutes, having ordered and been served a sandwich she took occasional bites of while she typed, he made his way towards her. He couldn’t help wondering, as he slowly crossed the big room of closely-crowded tables, if this was going to be one of those meetings he’d remember in later years as fateful and significant. Like that night in Peking at the height of the Boxer uprising, when he’d followed the Slayer into that temple. Or like that night in Southern California when he’d gone to a stupid little suburban nightclub to confront another.

Was his unlife about to change again?

Dawn Summers, five years older, five years apart, had the power to take him down, and Buffy too.

But larger than that, more important by far: she had the power to uphold. To uphold Buffy, and them both.

When he was still ten feet away, something made her look up from her work, and she saw him. He had time to notice how her expression changed, the blandness giving way to sudden recognition, and shock. She pushed back from the table, rose too quickly so her chair tipped over with a clatter, and for a moment she was like her younger self, foal-ishly unsure of what to do with her hands, her feet. Then she straightened up and made fists, and glanced around to get her bearings. 

Spike stopped where he was. He wasn’t going to come any further until she beckoned him, he wasn’t going to do anything to block her exit. From where he stood he could pick up the pungent aroma of her sudden fear. He let her see his hands. He said, “Hello, Bit. It’s only me.”

Her breathing, her heartbeat, he could hear and interpret. “Nothin’s happened to her, Buffy’s fine.”

Dawn stared at him, and as abruptly stared around her, as if looking for something concealed, and then back at him. “Buffy isn’t—?”

“Isn’t killed, isn’t gone, isn’t anything. Left her just now, on 23rd Street.”

“Buffy is on 23rd Street?” Dawn said this as if she was reading some foreign language by sounding it out.

“At the Chelsea, Niblet. I’ve always liked it there, though they’re doin’ a fair bit to ruin it, lately.”

“Oh God.”

“But it still stands.”

“ _FUCK. What the fuck are you doing here, Spike! You can’t be here!_ ” This came out as a harsh whisper. She didn’t want to attract attention, and that gave him courage, to come a little closer. 

“Just want to talk with you for a minute. Come, sit down and hear me out, yeah? Just for a minute.”

Without taking her eyes from him, she groped behind her for the overturned chair, righted it, and sat. After a brief nod from her, Spike came and took the chair opposite. 

Dawn was clutching the edge of the table in both hands now, and looking not at him, but at her computer screen. In its reflected light, he saw her more closely: along with the pixie haircut she was affecting a rather elaborate eye make-up, lots of liquid eyeliner that curved up and out at the edges, big earrings, and a tiny flat gold stud that gave off a little gleam near the curl of her nostril.  She was like a lot of look-at-me-I’m-in-New-York college girls, but she was also still Dawn Summers, the perpetual kid sister. Coming to love her like a big brother hadn’t been in the brochure either, but there had been times when it had seemed to him like the only part of the whole damn Sunnydale package that had anything bright about it.

“It’s good to see you. More’n good. How are you, Bit?”

She glanced across at him. “This is because of the five years, isn’t it?”

“She’s been keepin’ track. Knew you would be too.”

“I want my money. For the house.”

Spike wasn’t sure how to interpret this, or the tone of her voice. “She thought—we thought—you might be ready for a reunion. So much time having passed, since.”

Dawn’s mouth made an ugly shape. “If she thinks I’m going to share it with her, she can just forget that right now.”

_What? Was she talking about the proceeds from selling 1630 Revello?_

“I don’t owe her anything. Doesn’t she get that I just want her to leave me alone?”

“Bit, it’s nothin’ like that—we came because—“

“We! You love saying _we_ , don’t think I don’t notice. You sure got her, didn’t you? You won, Spike.” All at once she was in motion, shutting up the computer, stuffing it into the bag, and clamoring to her feet, feeling around in her pockets for money she flung on the table.   “I’m out of here.”

“Bit, wait—“

“Stop calling me Bit. Stop calling me anything. I don’t want to talk to you.”

He didn’t want to do anything that would get them noticed. He let her get nearly to the door before he followed, gaining the street just as she disappeared around the corner. He caught up with her on the sidewalk near the library, using his supernatural speed to come around so he approached facing her, not startling, not stalkerish. Quietly, he said, “I’ll leave you be now, but just this. You know where to find us now. We’ll stay here a while. You come an’ call on your sister any day you like. Or tell her to meet you anywhere you fancy, an’ she’ll come. All Buffy wants is to see you, see you’re all right. She misses you like blazes. You’re all she has.”

“ _I’m_ all she has?”

Spike took a step back from the energy of scorn and pain that scorched the air.

“She an’ me, we’re together, yeah. But it’s you who’s her family. It’s you she loves.”

 

As he walked back up Fifth Avenue in the bright night, past the lit shop windows, Spike reviewed the encounter. It could’ve gone worse, sure; she could’ve whipped out a stake and done for him, or hollered and gotten him mixed up with the police.   But it certainly could’ve gone better. He’d been harboring a fantasy that at the very sight of him—or at most, after a brief little bout of pouting—she’d fling herself into his arms and be his dear little Summers girl again. But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

Buffy had sent him three texts in the last hour: _Well? Well? Did you find her? WHAT????_  He texted her now, and she replied that he should meet her at the bar at Red Cat.

Buffy, who used to make the most amusing faces after taking swallows from his flask, had since become a girl who liked a cocktail.   She’d told him that when she went to bars alone, she would let herself go into elaborate fantasies, about the men she met and talked to there, about what life would’ve been like with them, if she was alive, and could pick someone and have a life with him. Or else she’d fantasize about how a man would taste, and what kind of fight he’d put up, and what he’d look like when she’d drained him dead. _I think about killing,_ she’d told him on that occasion. _I think about it all the time, I imagine very elaborate scenarios, I play them out in my mind. After all, I know what it’s like to kill. It’s not so very hard to guess what it is I’m missing. What I crave. Oh, I’m never going to do it. But I refuse to pretend I don’t want to._

He knew enough not to ask her to describe her imagined bouts of violence, or even her imagined forays into some other beating-heart life. He didn’t want to know about either. That was a kind of intimacy he knew he couldn’t have with her. One would break his own heart, and the other … the other had the potential, Spike thought, to send the two of them down some path from which there’d be no return. Because he too still thought about killing. Still missed it.

Red Cat was a posh little restaurant in an old rowhouse on Ninth Avenue, a few blocks west of the Chelsea. It was a pretty room with a nice old 19th century bar, crowded at this hour with well-dressed thirty-somethings drinking pricey wine, and when he stepped in, there was Buffy sitting on the last stool at the short end of the L, with her legs attractively crossed, twisting a martini glass by its stem on the wood surface in one hand and holding the other one against her neck as if she was chilly.   Vampires didn’t get chilly, but Spike had learned to notice this pose, and to read its emotional tone. Though every stool was taken and there were other customers standing alongside, she was alone, no one facing her. Spike thought she looked dreamy, her eyes unfocused, far away. She didn’t seem aware of him until he was right in front of her, and laid his hand on her knee.

“I see she didn’t come along. So she said no.”

“Well … “ Spike admitted, “she didn’t say yes.”

“But you saw her? Spoke to her. Did she let you speak to her?”

“For a few minutes, we spoke.”

“And—?”

“She was relieved to know you were alive. That was first thing. Gave me little sliver of hope.”

“But then—?”

“But then she wasn’t best pleased to see me, nor interested in settling in for much of a chinwag.”

“What did she say?”

“She looks beautiful. She cut off all that lovely hair, tho’; gone in for a sort of Audrey Hepburn gamine ‘do. Suits her, though. She lives in the dorm on Fourth Avenue, just above Astor Place.”

“What did she _say_?”

“I think should wait a few days. Wait a few days, an’ if she doesn’t come to you, you can try callin’ on her.”

Buffy gestured to the bartender for a fresh drink. Then she put her hand on top of Spike’s hand on her knee, and leaned a little towards him, and said, “You’re not going to tell me what she said? Was it that bad?”

“Was hard on her, all that happened.”

“Don’t I know that?”

“You do. We do.”

The bartender brought a fresh martini, glanced at Spike. Buffy said, “My friend will have a beer.”

“What kind?” the bartender said. “We have Full Sail "Session" lager from Oregon, Allagash "white" from Maine, Radeberger Pilsner from Germany, Founder Pale—“

“The German one, fer chrissakes,” Spike said. When the man had moved off down the bar, he said, “She’ll need a little time, now she knows we’re here, to think what to do.”

“You said ‘a little sliver’.”

“An’ I meant it.”

“You think it’s going to be all right.”

“I think you’ll get to see your sister. Beyond that … dunno.”

“I appreciate your honesty, Spike.”

_I try not to mislead you_ , he thought. _Not to mislead us both. Not anymore._

 

She seemed disinclined to leave the restaurant, though she wasn’t interested either in taking a table and ordering food. Buffy seldom ate food, and when she did, it was usually candy. Or cheese. She still liked cheese. But when Spike would, from time to time, try to get her to share some spicy, greasy, gorgeous snack he’d bought from a food truck in Mexico City or a street cart in Shanghai, she usually reacted like a splashed cat, or a supermodel offered anything but cigarettes and black coffee. 

_Why should I want to eat that?_

_Because it’s bloody good?_

_I used to think, those times I saw you eat people food, back when, that you were just showing off for us. Angel never eats._

_Angel never eats because he’s allergic to pleasure since he got his curse. Believe me, back in HIS day, I saw him put away plenty of big bloody porterhouse steaks, an’ all sorts._

_But let’s not talk about Angel._

_Agree with you there._

~~~

The Bobst library was big and well-lighted and full of people. Dawn felt safe in there. Not, she told herself, as she found a carrel and set up her laptop, not that Spike had made her feel afraid, exactly. He wasn’t going to attack her, not physically. But just seeing him like that had shaken her down to the ground. _Down to my soul_.

“Hey.”

Dawn jumped in her chair.

Her friend Keisha, who had come up behind her, jumped too. “Whoa! Sorry.”

“Oh, hey. Yeah, you startled me.”

When she looked up, Keisha’s eyes widened. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah—why?”

“I don’t know, you just look kind of—“

“I think I caught a chill, outside. I should’ve worn another layer.” Dawn thought of telling her friend, telling her—some version of it. _It’s the anniversary of my sister’s death_. Or _I saw someone from back home whom I didn’t want to see, who asked me for something I don’t want to give._ But no, no. She wasn’t going to do that. Wasn’t going to start talking. But her mind was racing now, on those thoughts. _My sister’s death. Someone from back home. What I don’t want to give._

“Want to get some coffee, get you warmed up?”

“I really have to work on this paper. I’m fine, really. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

When Keisha was gone, Dawn shut the lid of her laptop and laid her head down on her arms. It was coming back to her, like an instant replay: _Spike._ She’d been sitting opposite Spike, less than an hour ago, right over at Dojo, where she went like three times a week, Spike of all people had just walked into Dojo and talked to her about Buffy.

All these years, while Buffy kept sending those annoying emails, emails in which she’d write vague boring things about cities she was in, cities Dawn so wanted to be able to travel to and experience herself, and which Buffy mentioned as if giving herself an exotic backdrop would make her interesting and forgivable and _not dead_ and _not a vampire who had left her, who had left with Spike and forsaken her_. Some of her dumbass emails described movies she’d seen, for God’s sake. _You should try to catch it, it was good._  

But Spike never emailed. Spike didn’t write any PSs on Buffy’s notes, though Buffy always ended them with _Spike sends his regards_. Regards. What _were_ regards, anyway? Who still used that stoooopit 19 th century word, anyhow?

And then tonight, out of the clear blue nowhere, Spike walks into Dojo and calls her Bit and Niblet and wants bygones to be bygones. Wants her to see Buffy.

Everything was always all about Buffy.

It made her think of home, and she didn’t like to think of home. She didn’t like to think of Mom, but you couldn’t think about home without remembering Mom. It was too hard.

And she thought about Xander, who she’d had _such_ a crush on, and who was so nice, and she hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to him. What was he doing now, she wondered? Was he still with Anya? What were they all doing? She didn’t like to think about it.

Sometimes she was so tempted.

Tempted to track down Mr Giles, and just tell him.

Just tell him all of it.

She felt that temptation right now. He’d like to know, wouldn’t he? He’d like to know, at last, what had happened to his Slayer. The truth. Because when that detective had found her, just a few weeks after she’d moved in at Aunt Arlene’s, and Mr Giles called on the phone, and wanted to know what had made her leave Sunnydale and all about it, of course she’d had to say just what Buffy had told her to say. That one night her sister just hadn’t come home, which he knew. And hadn’t come home and hadn’t come home. And she couldn’t just stay there with Willow and Tara, it wasn’t working out, she needed her aunt, so she went. Why hadn’t she told any of them that she going?, Giles asked. None of them, not even Xander, not even Tara? Not even the people at her school? Well, because it was just fucked up. She’d said that, to Mr Giles, she’d said _fucked up_ , and felt the rebuke in his silence on his phone, and could imagine his consternation at her language, but he didn’t scold her, he just said he hoped she was happy with her aunt, and that he was sorry about Buffy, more sorry than he could possibly say. Of course Dawn knew that. She knew it was true. So she was sorry she’d said the F word to Mr Giles, but she didn’t want to have to talk to him anymore.

But she could call him up tomorrow—it was too late now, it was the middle of the night in Bath—she could tell him, _Guess what, I lied, Buffy has been a vampire for five years, she and Spike are international jet-setting vampires, and they don’t want you to know because you’d have them slain._

Dawn packed up and went back to her room. It was near midnight now, but the streets between Washington Square and her dorm a few blocks away were still lively. She liked that about New York, how they didn’t roll the sidewalks up at nine o’clock. Being in a city like this made her feel like an adult. 

In her room, she called Angel. She didn’t expect to reach him. It was prime supernatural-crime-fighting time in Los Angeles, he’d be busy. Calling him at all was a real sign of _extremis_ , because she didn’t really feel comfortable with him, and he was a bit scary, but at the same time she knew he’d helped her when she’d really needed help, and believed him when he’d told her he’d always be there for her. Though the reason for that was, again, Buffy. 

She wanted her life to be one where the things that happened and the people who were hers, had nothing to do with Buffy. That was the goal.

Angel answered on the second ring.

“Dawn.”

“Yes. Hi Angel.”

“How’re you doing?”

He sounded preoccupied.

“Is this a bad time? Are you fighting something, or stalking it, or in the sewer?”

“I’m just driving. What’s going on in New York?”

Well, here was her opening. 

“Dawn? What’s the matter?”

“Angel, my sister is here.”

Now there was hesitation on his end. And she heard her own voice echo back on her, heard the anguish in it.

“Have you seen her?”

“N-n-no. Spike.”

“You saw Spike?”

“Did you tell him where I live?”

“I told Buffy where you go to school.” Angel paused. “You never told me not to tell her.” He paused again. “I kind of assumed, since you told me, that you thought I’d let her know.”

Dawn, who was lying on her bed, pressed her face into the pillow.

“Dawn?”

“Spike said Buffy wants to see me. They came here from, I dunno, Outer Mongolia, so she could see me.”

“The last time I heard from her, it was Berlin.”

“Berlin. Whatever. Why are they doing this to me?”

Another silence. She could imagine Angel, with his big brow and his severe worried expression, behind the wheel of his fancy convertible on the Pacific Coast Highway, pondering how he was going to get Buffy’s annoying little sister off the line.

“I don’t know why. Buffy and I don’t really talk. No more now than … than we ever did. But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because she loves you as much now as she ever did. Which was always … always …”

“Always what?” 

“Always so very much. You’re precious to her.  When I saw her, right after your mother’s death … well, she did tell me that she was so glad she had you. That you were, really, all she had.”

“But that’s not true!” This burst out of her like a sneeze, a foul sneeze. “She had—she had all of them, all her friends, and she preferred to die rather than—and then she just wanted to die _again_. She let it happen. And then she took—“ Dawn stopped. She thought, _Oh my God listen to yourself._

Thirty seconds went by.

“Angel? Are you still there?”

“Dawn, what do you need from me?”

“Nothing. Just … I don’t know. Listen, Angel.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s going to be five years. In, like, a week. She’ll be missing five years, and she’s being declared dead. I signed a bunch of papers about it today.”

“I know. Not that you signed papers, but I know. How many years it’s been.”

“ _I hate it!”_

He was quiet again for a little, and then he said. “Dawnie, I know. I hate it too.”

“Angel, tell me what I should do.”

“Buffy and Spike came to New York? Where are they?”

She let out a sigh. “He said they were staying at the Chelsea Hotel.”

“Well, if you’ve never been to the Chelsea Hotel, then you ought to go and see it, before they renovate it out of existence.”

~~~

“So, is this the room where Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend?”

Spike inhaled sharply. “No.”

Buffy laughed.  She’d undressed,  and slipped into a silk nightdress, and was pulling down the bedclothes. The Chelsea wasn’t the kind of hotel that offers turn-down service.  “What, you can tell that by the smell? It was, like, what, over twenty-five years ago.”

“Can tell. You could too, if you’d known ‘em.”

“You knew Sid Vicious?”

“I’m amazed you’d even have to ask me that question.” He was standing at the window, looking down into West 23rd Street. It was nearly five a.m., and except for a lumbering bus, there was little traffic. 

Buffy laughed again, a sleepy, low, indulgent laugh. She came up behind him and threaded her arms around his waist. She hadn’t done anything like this in quite a while. They hadn’t made love in twenty-seven—no, twenty-eight days. Spike kept all kinds of mournful tallies in his head. But she’d had five martinis at Red Cat.

“Thank you for going to talk to Dawn. I know that can’t have been easy.”

He drew the blinds then, and turned to her. “You don’t have to pay me back.”

“What, you think I’m only coming on to you out of gratitude?” She smiled. “I want to make some clever bit of sexy wordplay out _tit for tat_ , but it’s not coming to me.” Her face fell.  “Oh Spike. You’re so very patient. And I’m so very disappointing to you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“All this time, I’ve known … ” She stopped. _Don’t say it out loud, Buffy_ , she thought, _don’t say, I don’t love you enough._   _At least let him hang on to his illusions that much._

“Come to bed. C’mon.” She grabbed his belt loops, tugged. When he didn’t move, she moved instead, coming in close again, going up on tiptoes. Kissing him was always good, it was just that more and more lately there were times when she couldn’t kiss him, couldn’t touch him, couldn’t even reach her true self. When she got lost in the awfulness of time that kept on moving without her. She wanted love with him, friendship with him, to make that all right somehow, it should’ve done more. It was real, she knew that now, he was real, his devotion was real. So it was just cruel, when she found herself thinking, _I’m his and he’s mine because there’s no one else for either of us, and I succumbed to that death wish, that death wish he always knew all about._ These thoughts were so harsh, and she knew they were false, and unkind to him. He _was_ a master vampire with thousands of kills in his hundred plus years, but he’d begun to move away from that well before she’d started to take him halfway seriously. So who was she to reduce him to that when she was herself such an imperfect vessel.

The flaw was in her. It had always been there, but now she was undead, it was so much bigger, without the other things to counter it.

She kissed him now, and like the good Spike that he was, he responded; he always responded. He always took whatever tiny thing she managed to offer him and responded to it with all of himself. Now he swung her up in his arms, in her slippery white silk gown, and carried her to bed. Took off his clothes for her, showing he was hard for her already, willing for her.   It touched her, how he waited, even so, for her to make the last inviting gesture, before he set a knee on the bed. She made him like that: careful, watchful. She wished it wasn’t like that.

“Sweetheart,” she said, reaching for him. “Do your worst.”

 

Some hours later they were still twined together, having slept, listening to the roar of the daytime traffic from behind the darkening blinds and drapes. 

Buffy moved her hand under the sheet, wrapping it around his cock, just holding it. She knew he liked that. “When you used to want me … back before I went off the Tower … when you used to think about me.”

“Yeah?”

“Did you ever think it would be like this?”

“I never thought it would be at all.”

“But I mean, how you fantasized it. Me being your girlfriend. I bet you thought it would be more—that there would be more—general hilarity.”

“Hilarity?”

“Spike, I’m sorry I’m so dark. You know it’s not about you, right? I mean …”

His hand came around hers, and lifted it off him, and squeezed it hard. She was lying with her head on his chest, so she couldn’t see his face.

“We have our hilarity,” he said. “We dance, don’t we, on many continents, an’ we fuck, which we’re magnificent at, an’ we go about together an’ see the world, an’ I for one am quite content with our arrangement.”

It froze her, to hear him. She struggled. “What I said, the other day, before we left Berlin …”

“What?”

“Spike, when I say stuff like that …”

“What?”

“Don’t listen to me.”

~~~

Dawn went to class. She finished her paper. She hung out with Keisha and some other friends. She couldn’t sleep, so she took an Ambien. She did not leave the vicinity of NYU.  She didn’t want to think about her sister and Spike in a room at the Chelsea Hotel, waiting for her.

It was all she could think about.

She let a week go by. Though it was more accurate, she thought, that a week hauled itself by, minute by devastating groaning minute, and it didn’t solve anything.

They were still there. They were still waiting for her.

She didn’t get any emails from Buffy. No texts. But she knew. A half hour’s walk uptown, that was all that divided them. And five years. And that betrayal that ate at the edges of herself like acid, that said, over and over in that childish voice _Mom left us and then you left me and you were glad to leave me, you loved death more than you loved me._

The bright autumn days of sunshine and crisp air and clear light against the stone facades of buildings, the rows of window glass, gave way overnight to rain. The temperature dropped, and students scurried from classroom building to library to lecture hall with umbrellas and hoodies and jeans damp from the knee down.

She’d sent the papers back. The anniversary of the day—the night, really—that Buffy went out to her death, was suddenly here. It was tomorrow. She said nothing to any of her friends. She was determined to have a day like any other day.

Aunt Arlene called in the morning. “I know this is a hard day, dear, but you know I’m thinking about you all the time.” Aunt Arlene was sensitive, and she’d risen to the occasion of taking in her dead sister’s second child, even though she barely knew her, which wasn’t the child’s fault. Dawn tried always to be grateful, and considerate, and not hold it against her that she sounded like Mom, and could look and move like Mom, but she was so not Mom. “Is there anything you want to tell me, Dawnie? You know there’s nothing you can’t say to me.”

Dawn thanked her. No, she was okay. She had to get to class. She had study group afterwards, and then she might see some friends. You know, the usual student day.

“Well, you take care. Be kind to yourself,” Aunt Arlene said. That was what she always said.

She went to class. It seemed to be a class all about the house on Revello Drive. Specifically about what it was like to come back to the house after school, like usual, and do her homework and get her own supper and wait for Tara and Willow to show up, because they usually came in earlier than Buffy did, and then see them go out again because they did that a lot. And sitting up waiting for Buffy, and Buffy not coming home. She’d spent that whole night, awake and waiting, listening to an album by Buffalo Springfield, because Karl at school had heard them at his uncle’s house and liked them so much that he copied a CD for her. So she’d put it on, this band from a long time ago that she’d never heard of, and let it play on repeat, and somehow it turned into the music she just played every night, waiting for Buffy, who didn’t show up. The first song on the album was called “Go and Say Goodbye”. It got stuck in her head, so that she heard it even when she was at school, even when she was watching TV or talking to somebody,

_Is it you don't want to see her cry, is that why/You won't go and say goodbye._

Every night for about ten days, it leeched into her and colored the whole awful lonely time, after which she couldn’t listen to _any_ music, or watch any TV, or do _anything_ to distract herself at all from the horror of her sister’s absence, of Spike’s absence, and of how, though the Scoobies were certainly alarmed, and certainly taking some actions, they also seemed to just go on with their own lives the same as ever. 

Then came the day of the phone call, four o’clock in the afternoon after school, Buffy’s voice suddenly there in her ear, telling her, and the whole thing shifted into a different kind of horror.

Suddenly everyone in the classroom stood up and shuffled out, and Dawn came back to the present and saw the clock had advanced by 90 minutes and she had no idea what had happened. She hadn’t written down a single thing.

_Oh God._

 

Angel had said that the lobby in the Chelsea Hotel was something to see. Dawn wondered, as she walked up Sixth Avenue,  passing the old department store buildings that housed TJ Maxx and Bed Bath & Beyond—so normal, nice and normal—what that was going to turn out to be. A hotel where vampires were habitués. 

It was a little after four, and the sun was low behind the buildings, the air blue and the shadows deep, while above, the sky was pink in places. There were so many people here, like her, walking, so many strangers. She liked New York for its fullness of strangers. But along with all these strangers, New York now contained two who were not strangers, because they were worse than strangers, and she was going to them. 

She was going, to get it over with.

She turned left at 23rd Street, went west, crossed Seventh Avenue, and then she could see it, the hotel’s ornate Gothic façade of red stone facing, its iconic sign—she knew it was iconic,

H

O

T

E

L

CHELSEA

in neon.

On either side of the double doors were brass plaques attached to the building. “Dedicated to the Memory of Dylan Thomas” said one. “Dedicated to the Memory of James Schuyler, Poet”, said another. Brendan Behan. Leonard Cohen. National Register of Historic Places. Sir Arthur Clarke, who wrote _2001 A Space Odyssey_ at the Chelsea Hotel. ‘I Can’t Do That, Dave’, inscribed on the plaque.

“I can’t do _this_ , Dave,” Dawn whispered to herself. She stood there, under the hotel’s awning, and read every word of every plaque, while flop sweat gathered under her arms, and her coat was suddenly too hot, even though it was frigid out here.

The door opened, and a couple came out. They weren’t Spike and Buffy. They were tall and thin and dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses even though it was nearly dark out, and one of them said something to the other in what might’ve been Danish, or Swedish. They walked off without glancing at her.

She took a breath, and pushed her way in.

Inside, it wasn’t what she expected. There was a huge baroque black fireplace on the left hand wall that went all the way up to the high ceiling, and there were velvet chairs, and a chandelier. But the thing she noticed most was a huge painting of a horse. A white horse, it’s head, with a long forelock, like a portrait. She saw that the whole lobby was hung with big crazy paintings, and there was a sculpture hanging from the ceiling, and the whole vibe was not spooky at all, it was like some eccentric rich art collector’s sitting room. All the way at the back was the hotel reception desk. Dawn crossed to it slowly, gawping around at the pictures, wondering what had brought Angel here, and when, which was a good way to divert herself from what she was about to do.

The receptionist looked like a normal person who would not be nonchalant about vampires.

“I’m here to visit …”

“Yes?”

“I’m here …”

She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t say the name, because then this man would hear it, and he would look in the register, and he would call up to the room.

Instead, she could mumble something about just being here to look, at the famous lobby, and its pictures, and she could retreat and not glance back at the receptionist who would think she was some kind of enormous dork. That was what she was about to do, except that the elevator door opened then, and Spike stepped out.

He was the same. He was the same as he’d been last week in Dojo, which was the same as he’d been back in Sunnydale. Still bleached blond, still clad in black leather and denim. Being with Buffy had prompted no change. Buffy hadn’t gotten him to dress better, or wear better shoes, or carry himself any differently. Seeing her, he registered no surprise. He smiled. “Ah, you came.”

The receptionist disappeared into the back, and for the moment, there was no one else near to watch or hear them.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Blood run. Your sis is upstairs puttin’ her face on.”

_Her face. Her face all ridges and fangs._ She’d seen it, in LA, and the memory of that, and what she’d done in the bathroom, with the glass, made her shudder.

Spike seemed not to notice. “You go up to her, good time for it, with me out of the way for a while. Have your sister talk in private.”

_I can’t do that, Dave._

“No. No! You have to be there too.” She stared at her boot-toes. “Will you go up and tell her I’m here. And I’ll wait for you to come back and get me.”

“Look, you can just come up with me now—“

“ _Spike._ Will you, for once, please let me have some agency here?”

He gave her a look then, and she knew he understood.

“All right, I’ll go announce you. You take a chair over there, an’ I’ll be right back.”

She went back into the big lobby, and sat near the big ornate fireplace. She could feel her heartbeat, making her whole body throb. Five years ago, she thought. Five years ago Buffy had gone on patrol, and she’d met some vampire, some random unknown vampire, maybe male, maybe female, maybe experienced, maybe brand-new out of the grave. And that vampire had killed her, and turned her. Turned her, made her into the one worst thing her sister had always dreaded.  And then. And then. 

She could still walk out of here. She could just get up and go back out onto 23rd Street. She could get a burrito on the way home, and then go to the library.

How much, she wondered, would the house go for? She had student loans. Aunt Arlene didn’t have a lot of money, to help her with college. But she’d been generous. She was very good to her, Aunt Arlene, who wasn’t Mom.

Buffy wasn’t Buffy anymore. She’s seen that, at Angel’s place. She’d seen that, five years ago. 

Angel and his people were sure Spike had done it. Not killing her, maybe, but the turning. They both denied it, but Dawn knew Angel and his people didn’t really believe them. Of course they’d deny it. They also denied that Buffy had killed anyone since her turning, but how could she believe that, how could she ever really know?

Buffy had wanted it. She didn’t want to be alive, she didn’t want to go on living at home with her little sister, and she’d taken that chance to go away with Spike. To be like Spike.

She could just get up and leave. She rose, and picked up her bag, and zipped her coat. She stepped towards the door.  She could get on the subway and be back at school in ten minutes. She could ask Keisha if she could crash at her place for a few days. They wouldn’t find her then, she’d stay away from Dojo too. Opening the hotel door, she felt the cold outside air on her face, and was stepping across when there came the touch on her elbow. She didn’t turn around. Her jaw was set. “Spike, I can’t.”

“Dawnie, wait.” 

It was Buffy’s voice. It was Buffy’s hand, which held her arm for one moment, before withdrawing. 

_Oh_. The cold air poured against her face, and behind her was that voice.

“Dawnie. Please.”

She couldn’t help herself. She glanced around.

There was Buffy.  The same Buffy. She looked not a day older. Her hair was the same way, the same color. She still wore pink lipgloss, and still had that worried anxious expression that had come on in the months before she leapt from the Tower, and never went away after. Except that under those smooth cheeks, those glossed querulous lips, was the other face, the one that ripped, that roared, that swallowed blood. Buffy had gotten that face, and she’d gone away. She’d taken Spike, and they’d deserted her. 

Spike was there, standing behind Buffy, beyond arm’s reach, his hands dangling at his sides out of the sleeves of his black leather, just watching them. She couldn’t meet Buffy’s eyes, so Dawn looked at him. His eyes were full, though his face was still. She saw in them all kinds of pleading, all kinds of anticipation. But he didn’t move, or speak. He waited to see what she would do.

Buffy didn’t move either. She too stood in an attitude of waiting, with hands hanging, and Dawn thought how hard that always was for her, her sister who was used to being bossy, to being in command, to being the one who acted, who marshaled her troops. But she was just standing there, waiting to find out what Dawn was going to do.

“You left me,” Dawn said. She barely recognized her own voice. It came out loud and strange, like a squawk. So loud that a couple of people sitting in the lobby chairs glanced up at them.

Buffy absorbed this into herself; Dawn, who still couldn’t look right into her eyes, saw her chew her lip, shift her weight. Quietly, she said, “Dawnie, I did. And I’m so sorry. I know I had my reasons, and they were good reasons, but I also know they didn’t seem good, or fair, to you.”

“It’s _never_ been fair!”

_Oh God, am I four years old?_ she thought. Apparently, she was. The four year old must speak. She must make her existential protest. Must decry that she’d never even _been_ a four year old, that she wasn’t real, she was a Key, she was a victim, and she was always always always getting left.

They were still standing by the door. No one was going in or out. Dawn wasn’t ready to move yet, neither in nor out.

“Yes, I know I should just _grow up_ , and _suck it up,_ and I will, I have, I DO, but—but—you hurt me, and I’m angry with you, and you can’t just make it better by showing up like this!”

“I know that,” Buffy said. “I know that I’ve made your life hard. You were given to me to protect from a fate that was supposed to destroy you. But I also know that you’re free now, that you escaped that fate, and the rest of your life is yours. And I’m still your sister, and I still want to look after you, not because you’re the key, but because you’re just Dawn Summers and I love you.” She spoke very low. Though there was noise from the street, and some ambient music playing in the lobby, still, Dawn heard them, each word clear and distinct; they seemed to ring in her mind. She thought, _Isn’t this what I’ve always wanted to hear?_

“Dawn, I miss you so much. I was waiting, hoping you’d tell me you were ready … but I couldn’t wait any more. I need my sister.  I need us to know each other. To be near to each other.”

Dawn’s skin prickled all over. She couldn’t feel her feet, her legs. The bag slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor. The edges of her vision began to boil, and she couldn’t blink.

Then Spike was at her side, his hand on her shoulder, his mouth near her ear. “Sssh, Niblet. Breathe. Breathe now. S’all right. You’re all right.”

 

Dawn didn’t collapse. Spike, who while she’d been in Heaven, had learned to gentle her sister, to whisper her, managed to get her then to come up to the room. In the elevator Buffy gave her as much space as the small car allowed, and again in the room, kept a distance, keeping quiet while Spike encouraged Dawn out of her coat, into a chair, and even got her to sip some of his Jack Daniels. She watched all this with wonderment. Spike’s description hadn’t prepared her for the changes: Dawn at twenty was all different, she could’ve been twenty-five, so erased was all the little girlness Buffy remembered. She had a new style, she’d left behind all her old self. And yet she was herself, Buffy thought, _I’d know her anywhere, and not just because I can smell everything now_. _I know her because she’s Dawn, and we’re part of each other, and I have always loved her, I have loved her retroactively, I love her in all dimensions._  

Dawn sipped the whiskey, and didn’t cough, and sat back in the chair, and crossed her long legs, suddenly self-possessed again. She looked around. Unlike the lobby, this room could’ve been a room in any random hotel. Buffy herself had been disappointed when she first saw it. Just a rather shabby room, spacious enough, with a big bed, and a table and two easy chairs, and a couple of bureaus, some lamps. Special only because it was inside the Hotel Chelsea and God only knew what acts of creative or brutal frenzy might’ve taken place in it since 1885.

“Angel said you were in Berlin.”

“You spoke to Angel?” Buffy asked.

“I asked his advice.”

“Ah. Uh-huh.”

Dawn crossed her legs the other way. Buffy thought she’d look good smoking a cigarette, like some mid-century movie star. She knew how to pose, how to deploy her lanky body. “I thought of calling other people too. I thought of calling up Giles.”

Quietly, Buffy said, “Would you like to do that? Do you think it’s time we turned ourselves in?” _She’s thinking it would serve us right_ , Buffy thought.

Dawn’s expression had gone stubborn. “I don’t keep in touch with anybody from back there, except sometimes Angel. I don’t know what’s become of any of them.” She jerked her ankle. “I would be afraid, still … what might happen, if they knew about you.”

“If you think they should be told, Giles, or any of them,” Buffy said, “I wouldn’t try to stop you. I ‘d prefer to stay on the down-low, but I think I understand what you feel about it, and I wouldn’t stop you.”

Dawn was still for a long moment, absorbing this. Buffy saw her stillness, as an alert stillness like a deer in a glade. Then Dawn shook her head. “Willow … might do things.”

“That’s what Spike and I have always … feared,” Buffy said, mildly, as if she was talking about something so very much more minor than being hunted down and slain, or forcibly resouled, or … any unimaginable mistake that Willow’s power and hubris could devise.

“I didn’t really come here to talk about Willow, or Giles, or any of that,” Dawn said. “I came because … well, I knew I had to. You cornered me.” She sniffed suddenly, and gave her head an angry toss. “That’s what you do, vampires, you corner your prey.”

Buffy said nothing.

Quietly, Spike said, “Now it’s you, bein’ unfair.”

“I know! _I know. God._ Do you think this is easy? Do you think I know what the fuck to say, here?”

Buffy wished she had a cigarette herself, but there was no smoking indoors in this city. “You don’t have to say it all at once. We can take our time, as much time as we need. If you want us to, if it’s okay with you … Spike and I will stay here.”

“What, stay in New York? Right here? For how long? I have to go back to Chicago for Thanksgiving. And then there’s Christmas break.”

“We’ll stay here, as long as you want us to. We’ll stay here indefinitely. I’d like to see you, and spend time with you, as much as you can give me.” Buffy moved a little closer, and when Dawn didn’t recoil at all, she came and sat in the chair opposite her. “I know you’re busy with school, but you could make a little time, couldn’t you, for your sister who lives just a few blocks away? And that way, whatever we have to say … it’ll get said, when the time is right. When the spirit moves us.”

Dawn was staring at her. 

Buffy smiled. “You used to like hanging out with me, remember? I always meant to teach you the right way to shoplift the really good lipsticks. But maybe not that, not anymore … we can go for long walks, to the movies, or … I could teach you to ice-skate.”

“I spent three years in the Frozen North, aka Chicago. I know how to ice-skate.”

“So we could go ice-skating.” She laughed suddenly. “Just us. Not Spike. There’s no Big Bad On Ice.”

Dawn was still staring. “I don’t believe this.”

“The only way you’ll believe it, is if you let it happen. Let me, let time, show you that I’m with you. I’m going to stick around, Dawn, and the next time anyone leaves, it’s going to be you. If you want to leave, you can leave. But I’m staying.”

Dawn looked at her as she spoke these words, and her expression was still composed, and rather sullen and shut off. Then she got up, and glanced around, then followed Spike’s pointing finger to the bathroom, where, a moment after she shut herself in, Buffy heard the water go on full. A sound mask her sister hoped would keep her from hearing anything else. Buffy would never tell her it didn’t work like that any more.

She looked at Spike, who sidled over to perch on the arm of her chair.

She whispered, “How is this going?”

~~~

The bathroom was just a bathroom, like the hotel room was just a hotel room. On the counter by the sink was a make-up bag, and various lotions and cleansers, her sister’s hair brush with a couple of blonde hairs stuck in it, toothbrushes, sticky hair gel that must belong to Spike, two boxes of dental floss, one mint, one not. Dawn looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t going to cry and ruin her eyeliner. _Isn’t this what you want? What you’ve been too proud and too afraid to even wish for, but in all actual fact WANT WANT WANT?_

But oh shit, what if it wasn’t … WHAT? Wasn’t what? Wasn’t good? Wasn’t sincere? Wasn’t real? Wasn’t enough to start filling up the bottomless yawing maw that existed inside of her and could never never never ever be filled up no matter how much love she was offered?

_I am a fucking broken thing. We are two broken things, the Summers sisters. Destroyed but still walking around._

Dawn opened the door. Buffy was still sitting in the chair. Spike rose from the chair arm and moved away towards the bed. He treated her, Dawn thought, like a queen. Like he was some kind of higher servant, a majordomo, to a very imperious queen. _I bet she really likes that._

She addressed her sister. “What do you _want_ from me?”

“If you mean, what do I demand from you, what am I going to force from you—nothing.” Buffy rose, and started towards her, and stopped half way. “I don’t want anything from you that you don’t want to give me. I just want to try to be, in this one little bit of our weird existences, _normal._ I want us just to be sisters, for as long as possible. Like … normal. _”_

“Like Mom and Aunt Arlene?”

“I hope we can be closer than they were. I don’t think either of them meant to let so much distance get between them. But yes, I want you to know you can rely on me, like Mom could on Arlene. She knew Arlene would take us if we needed somewhere to go. And Arlene would’ve been there for us when Mom was sick, except, maybe you don’t know this, but Mom wouldn’t call her. She wouldn’t let me call her.” Buffy sighed. “I don’t know why.”

“She didn’t want to be fussed at,” Dawn said. “Aunt Arlene’s kind of a fusser. It took me some getting used to.”

“But you get along with her, right? It’s okay there, right? Really? I never knew if you were telling me the truth.”

A sheepishness overcame Dawn. “Yes. I had a nice room, and went to a good high school, and Arlene has a lot of friends and they were all good to me, and you know I did really well and got some scholarship money. You know that, right? Did Angel tell you?”

“Angel forgot to tell me about the scholarship.”

“I got into all the colleges I applied to.”

Buffy sidled a little nearer. “Of course you did.”

“But I always knew I’d pick NYU.”

“And you’re doing so well. Have you made friends?”

“There’s a little pack I run with.” She smiled abruptly, thinking of Keisha, and Liv, and Paul and the others, whom she saw every day, and lived with as if they were in each other’s pockets. “I’m a double-major. English and Psych. I want to go to grad school. I think I want to be a therapist.” _The great therapist I never had._

“That’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you.” Buffy took another couple of steps, and now she was standing conversationally close. Dawn, who had been taller than she even in Sunnydale, was taller still. Buffy was wearing three inch heels, but so was she. Dawn found she could look at her now. Could see the greeny color of her eyes, and that she was wearing mascara—how did she put on mascara without being able to look in a mirror?—and her earrings were little diamonds. Up this close, searching for signs of change in her, it was kind of reassuring, albeit uncanny, that Buffy looked just like she had five years ago. She would always look this way, now.

“I like your earrings.”

Buffy put a hand up to touch one of them. “Spike gave them to me.”

Like a dog that hears its name, Spike perked up, and drifted over to stand just behind Buffy. Who turned and looked up at him with a soft gaze that reminded Dawn of … of the way Spike used to look, sometimes, at each of them. Back in the day. Buffy slipped her hand around his, and squeezed it, and held on. 

Dawn wondered how Spike had managed to get a hold of a pair of diamond earrings, but decided to save that question for another day.

“Speaking of jewelry … I still have the silver cross you gave me. The one from Angel.”

“Good. I wanted you to have it.”

“I’m not wearing it now.”

“It would be fine if you were.”

“I don’t … I don’t really wear it, honestly. I’m not a Christian. I’m kind of getting into … I might be a Buddhist.”

“I hope you’ll tell me about that, sometime. Sometime soon.”

“I’m still mostly just reading up on it.”

“I hope you’ll tell me everything,” Buffy said. “Everything I missed. Everything I should’ve noticed about you, and didn’t. I want you to know that you can. If you want to.”

Dawn said, “We’ll see.” She glanced at Spike, who, his hand clasping Buffy’s, stood listening to them with his head cocked, a familiar pose.  He seemed infinitely patient, like he’d stand there for days, holding Buffy’s hand, if that was what she needed.

_God, is there ever going to be someone like that for me?_ Then she thought, _He’s her only one. The only one like her. The only one who shares it. Maybe that’s what keeps them together, that affliction._ A wave of pity, unexpected and sharp, came over her. _Poor Buffy._ She pictured the Tower, in that terrible lightning-shot darkness, and what Buffy did there. _Everything happens to her. How does she stand it?_

All this was too uncomfortable. “I think I need to go now.”

“Already?”

“I still have to study tonight.” The urge to get out, instantaneous, couldn’t be withstood. She dived for her bag, and for the door. Opening it, she glanced back. Spike and Buffy were still standing there in the middle of the room, hand in hand. They looked, Dawn thought, in that last moment before she pulled the door shut behind her, like two lost children, waiting to be found.

~~~

“Spoke to the management about us moving into a suite,” Spike said, a few days later. “There’ll be a vacancy, end of the month.”

“Can we afford it?” Buffy was putting up her hair; she had pins in her mouth.

“We can afford it,” Spike said. “Got a bit of a break on it, for taking it on a long lease.”

“How long?”

“Manager knows me of old. Knows I can commit to a long long time.”

This was another one of those things Buffy decided not to probe into, how the management had come to know that Spike was a vampire, like where exactly all the funds came from, and what exactly Spike had done in all the years before he’d come to Sunnydale.  He’d implied once or twice that somehow the money had to do with Angel, not that Angel gave it to him, but that theirs being an old line, there was some fortune accrued over centuries, to be drawn on, when needed. 

It was easier not to think about it too much. Maybe in fifty years, in a hundred, she’d ask some more questions.

So they moved, at the end of the month, into a suite on the Chelsea’s top floor, with a large sitting room, and two bedrooms, one larger than the room they’d had before, the other ample enough, and a kitchenette, and two bathrooms. Unlike their previous room, this suite was not shabby and nondescript; someone, relatively recently, had had it nicely renovated. There was some furniture in it, kind of Danish modern-y, which was quite good, so Spike said, though she herself didn’t have much of an eye for that kind of thing. They got more furnishings, too. They made it comfortable.

Spike watched her, the first few days after they’d relocated. Here was the thing she’d always talked about and always evaded: the place they could settle down. He’d half expected her to wriggle out of it somehow, before they’d received the keys, and even now they were here, he wasn’t sure what Buffy would do. 

On the first full day they’d been in there, he’d helped Buffy make up the bed in the second bedroom. She’d bought beautiful bedclothes, sheets, comforter, everything, stupidly expensive and luxurious. But as they put them on,  she’d said, “Don’t say anything about this to Dawn.”

“No? This bedroom’s for her. Whole point of moving up to the suite, yeah?”

“I hope it will be. But please don’t say anything yet.”

Dawn hadn’t come back again, to the Chelsea. Instead they met her, on Sunday nights just after dark, in Washington Square, and went for walks if it wasn’t freezing and icy, and to a bar-restaurant they liked on the far west side, where there were no student types, where one could sit for a long leisurely meal with lots of cocktails, excellent service and no one rushing you. During these visits, Buffy ordered and ate. Spike knew she did it not because she wanted the food, but because she wanted Dawn to be at ease. It would call too much ostentatious attention to her undead state, if she sat there with nothing in front of her.

Spike paid. He liked to see Dawn tuck into the most expensive steak on the menu.  

The first time they went there, Dawn said, “I hope you’re not going to make me do a runner when the check comes.” And “If you had money, why didn’t we know it before?”

Spike just raised an eyebrow. “Did I ever stint you pizza an’ ice cream an’ a tenner to go to the flicks with your pals, that summer?” 

It was a glimpse, Buffy saw, into that time she’d been dead, and she listened eagerly. Dawn looked into her cocktail, twisting it in her hand. “No. I didn’t think where your money came from, I guess I thought you stole it. But then—“

“Your sis wouldn’t have taken a penny from me in those days,” Spike said, with a shrug. “Anyway, never mind all that, now we’re here, no copper pipes to be responsible for, an’ you’ll have the t-bone.”

Apart from those regular Sunday evenings, most weeks Dawn would text Buffy, usually on a Wednesday, to meet her when the library closed at midnight, and they’d go to an all-night diner nearby, just the two of them, to visit. 

Buffy always stayed out all night, though the amount of time she actually spent with Dawn might be as little as half an hour, or as much as four. She always took a stake with her, and “did a spot of work”, as Spike called it, before coming back.

Buffy would be in various moods when she returned from these outings. Spike didn’t quiz her. He could guess, when she came in silent and somber, that perhaps Dawn had been moody, that they’d quarreled. Other times she’d seem contented.

She always fucked him on those mornings, before they went to sleep, and it was good, she worked him hard, but so tenderly. Left him feeling things she wasn’t going to say in words.

 

It was a winter of waiting for the other shoe to drop. When Dawn went back to Evanston at Christmas time, Buffy was nervous. What if going back there made her start to think differently? What if Giles decided to reach out to her again? 

But Dawn came back, resumed her classes, and when Buffy, meeting her that first Wednesday night, asked about her trip back home, Dawn talked about parties with high school friends, and presents, and she felt reassured.

Then one night, returning from a foray to the Village, she complained to him, “I always get her to talk about her future, about what she wants to do, all her plans and dreams. But she keeps asking me what I’m going to do. What I’m _doing_.”

“An’ what do you say?” They were lying on the rug, because they’d just finished one of those fucks where the bed was just the starting-off place, and they’d had to travel the room, pouncing and crawling and capturing and mauling.  

“I answer her questions. She knows I still slay. That I’ve had jobs here and there. But what she doesn’t get is what’s it’s _about_.  My future. As a Vampire-American. It worries her.”

Spike didn’t like this line of thought. It was the same one that had led Buffy, back in Berlin, to hint around about not being able to go on. And it was damn annoying that Dawn, after all her complaints about being abandoned, shouldn’t keep whatever spiritual existential dread she had about her sister’s ongoing unlife to herself.  

“I told her, that I came to New York to be with her, for as long as she needs me. I said that’s all she needs to know, that she shouldn’t worry about anything. But she doesn’t like it. She wants all these disparate things to _make_ _sense_. She wants to know that there’s some kind of moral purpose, like there used to be.”

“Does Dawn have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend, or a hook-up, or whatever?”

“I don’t think so. She hasn’t mentioned it.”

“What she needs is a good rogerin’.”

“ _Spike_. Crass much?”

“I mean, if she was havin’ a bit of what we just did, on the regular, she’d get a better perspective. That it’s the here an’ now that matters. Sensation, an’ trading spit. Cock an’ quim. _This_ ,” he seized hold of her sex with his hand, and jiggled it, “this is the seat of joy. Future’s only nebulous.”

 

It bothered him. He kept thinking about it, after that conversation. He could imagine how Dawn needled her, with that way she had of knitting her brow, bringing up nagging moral questions that even the great philosophers of history, let alone Buffy, weren’t going to have pat answers for.

He went downtown. An unscheduled visit. Found her, after looking in a couple of places, where he first did, at that beansprouts and hummus joint, Dojo. 

This time when she spotted him coming towards her, she didn’t panic and turn over her chair, but she still looked like he must be bad news on two legs.

“Is everything okay?”

“What, I can’t stop by for a chat without somethin’ being wrong?”

“No, just—“

“Your sister’s fine,” he said, taking the chair opposite. “We’re not joined at the hip. She does her thing, I do my thing.”

“And your thing right now is coming to see me.”

“You in the middle of some deadline?”

She shook her head. 

“Look, reason I came … what’d you two talk about, last time you were together?”

Dawn went on the immediate defensive. “What did we—? Stuff. We talk about, you know, stuff. I thought you _wanted_ us to.”

“Bit, Big Sis does the best she can, with the hand she was dealt.”

“Uh … okay.”

“She’s done her part, saved the world, more’n once. She still wears the white hat. But I don’t think you get what it’s like for her, when you ask her these questions.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Think the phrase was ‘moral purpose’. I hear those two words come out of the Slayer’s mouth, I know she didn’t come up with that all on her lonesome.”

Flummoxed, Dawn fell back in her chair. “Did she send you down here to tell me off?”

“Doesn’t know I’m here. Wouldn’t like it if she did. Bloody hell, I don’t like it either, last thing _I_ am is the fellow to deliver this speech. Only Buffy’s more fragile than you know, an’ when you pester her about her Future Moral Purpose … it gets her down.”

Dawn’s elbows came up onto the table, supporting the face she hid in her hands. “My only sister is a vampire. She doesn’t have a chip, she doesn’t have a soul, and she’s … kind of a fugitive.”

“True, true, an’ true. An’ she’s keeping company with the likes of me. But I tell you she’s all right. She tries an’ strives more now than even in her Glory days. An’ she’ll _be_ all right, but it’ll be better if you show a little more confidence in her. A little less holdin’ her to some account.”

Dawn peered out at him between her fingers. She looked weary.

“Do you doubt it? I promise you, she’s by way of bein’ a virgin, in the vampire way, and will remain so. And so far as moral purpose goes, hasn’t her keeping faith with you these last years proven that?”

“Oh, Spike.” She dropped her hands, and he saw two tears start up in the corners of her embellished eyelids. He reached across the table and caught them with his thumbs.

She grabbed his wrist before he could withdraw. “Why didn’t you ever write to me?”

“Eh?”

“’Spike sends his regards’. That’s all I got, fucking fictional regards, at the end of her emails.” The tears were coming down now, too fast to catch. She was still clutching his wrist. “I fucking missed you! Ever since they brought her back, you just, just—you were there for me, all that summer and then, wham! Buffy’s back, and you didn’t know me anymore!” She shoved his arm away. “You never really cared about me—I was a substitute—“

“No!” He tried to keep his voice down, but the thump he gave the table made people all around them turn to look. He leaned in closer. “Not true. Not true. Least—never meant—“

She was full on crying now, hiding her face again, shoulders jerking. “Sweet, never meant to hurt you. M’sorry.”

“ _Are_ you? Or do you just want me to fall in line so Buffy can have what she wants?”

The bitterness that was in her, Spike saw, would take a long long time to dispel. If it ever did. 

“There’s a truth to that way of lookin’ at it. You’re right to air it out. But I tell you, you’ll never know peace, if you don’t let that go now you’ve said it.”

“’Let it go’. That’s another one of those phrases I love, like ‘closure’.”

 “You an’ sis want the same thing, seems to me, which is each other.”

Dawn gave a long sniff, and dabbed at her eyelids with a paper napkin. Then she gave him a fierce look.  “ _And_ you. I want my friend Spike back.  I don’t think I have him yet. I only have the Spike who comes out on the QT to tell me how to treat _her._ ”

He hadn’t expected this. Wasn’t prepared for it. To be claimed, and so angrily.

“Could only deal with the biggest crisis. Your sister was—“

“Has she been in crisis every minute of the last five years? So you didn’t have a hand free to write me so much as a note? Much as you _must_ have wanted to.”

Oh, she _was_ hurt.

“I didn’t know … didn’t realize. That was a situation, that time after the slayer’s leap, an’ I’d promised her. Only later there were others who were closer to you, had more of a right to be lookin’ after you …” He stopped. It sounded lame, he knew it.

“Oh, I see. It was situational. You’re not actually my friend. Outside of that old situation.”

“… no. Christ, I failed you.”

“You sure did.”

It was hard to confront her, those big eyes of hers that were always full of feeling, and somehow made more so by the make-up, smeary now, and the tears. But he made himself do it. “You’re right. I was stupid, an’ didn’t think.  M’sorry, Bit, from bottom of my heart.   You do have me.”

She heard him, but somehow she was still waiting.

“… whatever happens to Buffy. Long as I’m on this earth … I’m your friend.”

She gave herself a little shake then, and withdrew that drilling gaze. “I better not be sorry later on, believing that. Shit. Let’s get out of here.” She started pulling her things together.

He followed her out onto the night street, where the wind funneled biting between the tall buildings. Now what? Would they just go into some coffee bar, and sit down again at some table? He wanted to invite her back to the hotel, by rights he ought to. But Buffy clearly wasn’t ready yet, to bring Dawn there again.

Why she’d so carefully prepared a place for her, and then kept it a secret, he didn’t understand.  

Now they’d fallen into their little groove of weekly meet-ups, it seemed to him like time to get beyond it. For all they saw each other so regularly, the girls still weren’t treating each other like sisters. Spontaneity was missing. He’d just found out something about why, on Dawn’s side. But he knew enough about Buffy not to break his promise. The inviting must be left to her.

The wind had dried Dawn’s face. She looked at him, blinking, her shoulders hunched up, hands thrust into her pockets. “We can’t just stand out here. You can come back to my dorm and meet all my roommates who will probably think I’ve picked up a very inappropriate older man and will do everything they can to cock-block me. Or we can just finish this up at Starbucks.”

He opted for Starbucks.

 

It was a blizzard, in February, that forced the spontaneity. Snow came down all through one night, and it was still driving hard in the morning, when all of Manhattan below 14th Street, and some parts of Brooklyn, fell dark.  By the end, there’d been no power for almost four days.  But Buffy didn’t wait that long to call her sister and say, “Don’t stay there in your freezing dorm. We have a room for you here.”

~~~

Spring forward. Dawn had never thought about what that meant for vampires, Daylight Savings Time. An hour longer to wait in the evening, before they could venture out. 

It wasn’t really spring yet, when sundown made its jump on the clock. Dawn stretched in bed, yawning, and looked at her phone. The time was 9:20, which was really 8:20, but that was still late for her to sleep, with her schedule that semester. Still, she lay there a while longer, on the impossibly soft sheets, under the light warm puffy comforter. The street outside was Sunday quiet, but she could hear some distant radiatorial knocking in the hotel’s old plumbing, and from far down the hall, the sound of someone practicing the piano.

Then a little knock at her door, and Buffy came in, in her nightgown, and she was yawning too because she hadn’t gone to sleep yet. She held the little silver tray, with the two pretty antique coffee cups with the roses painted on them, and the heavy silver coffee pot that held enough for two, and the cream jug shaped like a cow. These were things that Buffy had acquired for their sole use, and they’d already made a little ritual for themselves, on the few nights Dawn had come and stayed over, since the blackout last month. 

She perched at the foot of the bed, set the tray between them, and poured out the coffee. 

“What are you going to do today?” Buffy always asked this, first. Dawn never said so, but it reminded her of how Mom used to wake her up, when she was small. She’d come in and kiss her and ask what they were going to do that day.

“What do I ever do? Go to the library and study.”

Today, for the first time, Buffy asked another question. “Have you thought about what you’re going to do … this summer?”

“Last year I went back to Evanston. I have to earn money.”

Buffy huddled her knees up to her chin, suddenly shy. “You could get a job in New York.”

“I can’t afford to live in the dorm all summer.”

“Stay here. This is your room.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you like it?”

“Buffy …”

“Don’t you know we did this for you? Spike and I … we want you to … this is …” 

Dawn leaned forward, and laid a hand on Buffy’s bare foot. “This is what?’

She shook her head. “I don’t know why I can’t get it out.”

“I want to hear it.”

“But you _know_.”

Dawn thrust out her chin. “Say it. You have to say it, so we both can hear it.”

Buffy picked up her cup again, and balanced it on the top of her doubled knee. Her words came out in a whisper Dawn had to strain after. “You got taken away, you lost it all, everything in Sunnydale, and I hate that. I hate that you got left high and dry. And I know these are just rooms in a weird old hotel. And I’m a vampire and my boyfriend is a vampire and we’re never not going to be vampires.  But if you’ll stay with us, Dawnie … we can make it something nice. The three of us here. For however long you want. So that when you’re ready to leave us, to go have all the wonderful adventures you’re going to have in your life… you’ll be leaving from home. And you’ll have home to come back to.” She looked up then, her gaze fervent. “As long as I’m around, Dawn, as long as Spike is around, we’re going to have a home for you to come to.  Okay?”

Dawn looked at her. All hunched up and defended, like she needed to hide. But while holding out this shining promise.

Buffy waited, and when Dawn stayed silent, she said, “Can that be what matters most? Just that Spike and I love you and want you to be domestic with us whenever you want. Whenever you can. Could you let that be enough?”

Dawn understood now, it came to her, that as much as she was promising, Buffy was pleading too: she needed her. They both needed her, because without her, there was no refuge, no resting place, for either of them.  They couldn’t make that, a couple of on-the-wagon vamps, on their own.  Which was why, she realized, they’d been so restless these five years. Waiting for her, hoping for her, so they could find at last, all three together, home.

Dawn took the cup from her hand, and set it on the round silver tray, and moved the tray down to the floor.   Then she took her sister into her arms, and pulled her in close. “Oh Buffy, it’s more than enough. It’s just right. It's just what I wanted.”

Buffy gave off a little laugh, relief, exhilaration, and they held onto each other, letting the promise suffuse them. Then came a little knock on the door, and Spike, who must've, Dawn guessed, been lingering on the other side, looked in.

"It's all right then, is it?"

The look of them, together, made him smile.

END ~~~~

Completed 12/1/15


End file.
